Run For Cover; It's Mozilla 1.4 Alpha

asa writes "Mozilla 1.4 Alpha is out. This release features dynamic image and table resizing in Composer, smooth scrolling (see release notes for enabling this feature,) and usability improvements to spam filtering. In addition to these feature improvements, 1.4a also contains fixes for performance, stability, standards support and website compatibility. This is an alpha release so expect bugs, and don't use it unless you are willing to live with the risks inherent in such a release (ie. crashes, data loss, etc.). More information is available in the release notes."

Comments

Ok.. you can stop now

[Anonymous Coward]

April Fools is OVER!

6 months ago Mozilla was at .99..

A project that's been in the work for well over 3 years..

And NOW 1.4 Alpha?!?!

Excuse me while I go pop some more of those hallucination thingies I had before

Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not on by default? What's up with this? Those less technical users who value eye candy like this are the ones that don't know how to turn this thing on and they wouldn't know that such a thing exists, either...

Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[Anonymous Coward]

smooth scrolling is in experimental stages.

there's already atleast 1 crash bug filed against it (sometimes, horizontal scrolling causes a crash).

Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[RoLi]

Why do so many people believe that "less technical users [are those] who value eye candy"?

Is there even something, I'm not even asking for proof, just a hint or some study that supports the hypothesis that less technical users want eye-candy?

I have several hard facts that are supporting the theory that less technical users don't give a shit about eye candy:

• Less technical users used MS DOS for over half a decade when Apple and others were available as alternative
• In the late 90's, Enlightment was sure one of the most - if not the most - eyecandy infested Windowmanager. Yet it was only used by geeks, less technical users didn't care.
• The first search-engines like Yahoo put more and more eyecande (and advertisments) on their sites - and Google wiped the floor with them by providing the simplest search engine interface possible with absolutely no eye-candy, just a white page.

I also tried MacOSX. In the first 15 minutes, you are really blown away. It's smooth, everything is animated, everything looks good. After about 20 minutes, you get used to the effects, after an hour they just slow you down and go on your nerves. I could only choose between 2 different types of animation for minimize, so you can't even get rid of some of it.

If eye-candy gets into the way, it should be off by default, IMO and smooth-scrolling is a prime example.

Not mentionned in the story ...

[Pat__]

The code for the bookmarks has been rewritten so you can see major updates there including icons in the sidebar (still waiting for icons in the personal toolbar) but that's a good start.

Also the dynamic image resizing in Composer is way too cool :-)
Worth launching Composer just to see it in action.

And finally for those of you using the pie-menu extentions you should download the latest version compatible with 1.4 alpha.

Bookmarks, new feature

[metz2000]

An excellent new feature has been added. The ability to drag and drop bookmarks using the menu only. No longer do I have to go into Bookmark Manager!

Still can't right-click the items in the bookmarks menu, but hey maybe in a future release. :-)

Very good work IMHO.

NTLM on Windows!

[bunratty]

Asa didn't mention one new major feature -- Windows builds now support NTLM authentication. This was the one blocker for lots of folks who wanted to run Mozilla at work. Eventually, other platforms will get NTLM, too.

Re:NTLM on Windows!

[weave]

Let's hope they fix bug 162025, another huge corporate blocker. If a place has a GPO that redirects the %appdata% folder, mozilla won't work. If a mozilla profile is pointed at UNC pathname, it won't work.

Read my ranting about it for more details in comment #28 of that bug.

I manage 2000 desktops and deployed Mozilla before fully understanding the ramifications of this bug. The end result was a lot of pissed off users of lost profiles over and over.

Don't think it's a big deal? My employer's entire IT structure was recently looked over by an outside consultant and during my interview, she asked "What is your e-mail client?" I said "Mozilla." She was like "Mozilla was a big mistake let me tell you. Your users hate it."

And the only reason they hate it is because Windows, when using roaming profiles (and my users roam a lot being it's a college) likes to move the location of the profile (eg, ...\username, ...\username.domain, ...\username.domain.001, etc) and if that happens, mozilla goes to hell and loses the profile. And you can't move %appdata% to a UNC path via GPO to get around this because Mozilla just plain ole won't work then.) And while you can move most of the profile to a fixed drive letter place, like Z:\mozilla, registry.dat file still must remain in %appdata%.

So here I tried to give my users a browser alternative and I got reamed by a consultant (whose final report hasn't been released yet) for doing it.

So yeah, I'm a bit bitter... If you manage a windows domain environment, avoid Mozilla, Netscape 7, or anything based on the code, until this bug is fixed,. Learn from my misfortune.

Export Restrictions

[kinnell]

This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria)

They forgot France, Germany and Turkey.

p.s. Taliban controlled areas? I thought the Taliban had been defeated.

Re:Aint Slashdot Great?

[Tyreth]

Got a screenshot of the smooth scrolling? :)